By James A. Loyola
The SM group of companies has contributed ₱100 million to the multi-sector COVID-19 poverty relief initiative called Project Ugnayan in addition to ₱170 million in medical supplies donations to frontliners in over 50 hospitals nationwide.
Project Ugnayan aims to bring muchneeded support to over 1.5 million families (or 7.6 million persons) affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. It has raised over ₱1.6 billion in pledges from over 30 participating corporations.
The project is an assembly of local corporations, the government and the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (PDRF) to fund aid to urban poor residents in Greater Metro Manila and nearby provinces.
Project Ugnayan has mainly tapped into Caritas Manila’s Project Damayan for the distribution of supermarket vouchers to underprivileged families and ABS-CBN’s Pantawid ng Pag-ibig as well as the Asian Development Bank and the Government’s Bayan, Bayanihan Project for the distribution of food packages.